by Jack Viertel
It’s easy to spot these numbers, some greater than others: “Cool” in West Side Story, “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” from The Music Man, “N.Y.C.” from Annie, and, in the modern era, “Keep It Gay” from The Producers, with its unmotivated celebration of gay pop culture from the Choreographer’s Ball to the Village People. Tent poles are usually fun. They’re usually up-tempo, too, though “One Short Day,” from Wicked, in which we finally arrive at the Emerald City, is a midtempo pop-rock odyssey, which suddenly morphs into double time as the gates open, and backs down with the introduction of the Wizard himself. By the end of it, we’re willing to sit still for another little while and see what the Wizard has to say.
Hamilton makes a tent pole out of the entire American Revolution—a bold step and hardly a “fun” number. But the kinetic excitement of watching a real showman figure out how to do a war in one extended number manages to thrill and reignite an audience that has already been sitting for a long time and processed a surprisingly large number of events. The show brings all its resources to bear in one explosive sequence comprising two numbers—“History Has Its Eyes on You” and “Yorktown”—at the end of which you’d think it would be time for intermission. But cannily, the number gives the audience enough energy to sustain it through a couple more scenes.
As is true with Hamilton, tent poles usually involve lots of people, too, but not always.
In Stephen Sondheim’s Company, there is a showstopping turn in this spot—but it’s a solo. “Another Hundred People” was written for a specific performer—twenty-one-year-old Pamela Myers, who auditioned for the show but didn’t suit any of the roles in it. The character she played was reimagined around her; the number was created for her, too. And it was in the second act. As Sondheim recalls in his lyric collection Finishing the Hat, the number was cut after a three-hour first preview in Boston. In a last-ditch attempt to save it, he refashioned it, taking three short book scenes that George Furth had written and alternating a section of the song with a page or so of dialogue, so that the song covered a passage of time and grew more intense with each appearance. He then reinstalled it in the second-to-last spot in Act 1, and it went back into the show, where it’s been ever since. There’s little doubt that tent poles were the last things on his or his collaborators’ minds as they worked frantically but systematically (such things are possible in the theater) to get the show ready for the Boston critics. But what they ended up with was a tent pole nonetheless. The character, one of the three young women the hero courts halfheartedly, is discovered alone onstage and sings, to a propulsive, shifting rhythm, about the unending daily arrival of young hopefuls to a big, exciting, cold city that doesn’t care if they live or die. Each section drives harder than the previous one, thanks in part to some great Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, and in the end it tears the place apart.
In some respects, the number is a distant cousin of the title song in Guys and Dolls—it’s a statement about the way things are from the point of view of a specific character, but the character is standing in for the authors. It’s not a plot song. But unlike “Guys and Dolls,” which is up-tempo, ingeniously funny, and harmless, “Another Hundred People” wounds as it excites—it causes audiences to sit up and take notice, and it gives a performer an opportunity to stop the show. In Company, numbers were shifted around a lot as the show found its form. Since it was essentially plotless—a show built around a subject instead of a story—the placement of the songs was in some ways up for grabs and ended up having more to do with controlling the biorhythms of the audience than with revealing specific story information at a specific time. (The final number, “Being Alive,” is a notable exception, dealing as it does with an emotional dam finally breaking for the hero. It can go only at the end, but it was written out of town after most of the rest of the show had found its form.) As a result, “Another Hundred People,” coming after the hero’s heartbreaking confession of loneliness in “Someone Is Waiting,” fit the bill at the one-hour mark. It roused the audience and raised the emotional stakes in a way that kept it alert for that last section of Act 1 still to come.
This underlines the reality that good musical theater writers rarely write to pattern, even though this book keeps describing the pattern they don’t write to. The best writers are always trying to break the mold they perceive in the work of their predecessors and mentors, none more than Sondheim. And yet, when the dust settles, the result often fits the pattern anyhow. There’s no logical explanation for this, but the best one I’ve heard came from a veteran producer who was reacting to the discovery that his own show was falling into line around the very commonplaces he was hoping to defy.
“The fact is,” he said, “if we want to succeed, we’re owned by the audience. And as many hot new ideas as we may have, the block of people who buy the tickets remains more or less the same—they’re human beings, and they behave like human beings. So who are we to ask them to behave different? They want to know who the show’s about? We better tell them. They want to know what it’s about? We also have to tell them that—before they lose interest altogether. They want to pee at nine-twenty? We’d better arrange for that, too. We’re charging a lot of money here, and the bathrooms are too small.”
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Perhaps the most perfectly realized of the tent poles is, not surprisingly, in a Jerome Robbins show. Robbins didn’t seem to like energy for its own sake—in his mind it wasn’t a commodity to be wasted. Also, he liked to use dance to tell a story. So his tent poles tend to be important to the plot, not a relief from it, none more than “Tevye’s Dream.” Fiddler on the Roof, by today’s standards, is a long show. We’re more than an hour into it when Tevye, the hero, is discovered in bed in the midst of a sleepless night, trying to solve a dilemma worthy of Solomon himself. He’s promised his daughter’s hand to the wealthy old butcher, but the girl is in love with the poor young tailor. And Tevye’s wife, trying to make an advantageous match, is reveling in the prospect of her daughter’s marriage to a rich merchant. Tevye loves his wife, but he can’t possibly deny his daughter. Yet he daren’t risk his wife’s wrath. Or his daughter’s eternal heartbreak. What to do?
We in the audience don’t even really know what he’s thinking about as we watch him puzzling restlessly in bed, his wife, Golde, sleeping peacefully beside him. But then we see him get an idea. Anyone lucky enough to see the original production of Fiddler early in its run had the privilege of watching the great comic actor Zero Mostel get this idea. His eyebrows rose to meet his comb-over, and his eyes turned into saucers the size of quail eggs. The man had an idea. But what was it?
In “Tevye’s Dream,” he awakens Golde by pretending to be in the throes of a horrifying nightmare. He knows she’s superstitious, and once he’s roused her from her slumber, he babbles breathlessly, knowing that eventually she will utter these magic words: “Tell me what you dreamt and I’ll tell you what it meant.”
With this opportunity, he launches into the tale, fabricated moment by moment and brought to life in vivid staging, of how their daughter’s wedding is disrupted by the appearance of a ghost—Golde’s long-dead grandmother, no less—who comes to warn them of the dire consequences of marrying the wrong man. Tevye lays it on thick, and Robbins creates a thrilling comic ballet, full of sound and fury, in which the message is never in doubt: marrying the wealthy butcher will lead to chaos and calamity—fire, brimstone, and God knows what else. The poor tailor is the man intended for their daughter—preordained, in fact, by Golde’s ancestors, not Tevye’s. Tevye’s description of the events becomes more spectacular as Golde needs more and more convincing, and Robbins stirs things up until Golde’s grandmother is levitating off the stage floor and wedding guests are shrieking and running for cover.
Golde, needless to say, comes around in the end, satisfied that it is her superior interpretive powers and her ancestors’ wisdom that have made the difference. By the time the number ends, Golde has arrived where Tevye needs her to be—in favo
r of the tailor. The mother will be happy, the daughter will be (poor but) happy, the family will be preserved, and life will be permitted to go on, at least until the next crisis.
The number, like “Havana,” solves a plot problem while it is making a loud and entertaining noise, and the audience, which may have been thinking about stirring, is ready for the wedding that (finally) brings down the curtain.
Robbins and George S. Kaufman, who directed Guys and Dolls, were—like Oscar Hammerstein—masters of the waste not, want not approach. Anything in a show that could do double or triple duty should be made to do so. As the producer Cy Fever was fond of saying, “Everything in show business is twenty minutes too long.” Search for economies wherever they can be found. The result will be a shapely elegance and grace in the storytelling, and the audience, knowingly or not, will appreciate the trouble you’ve taken for its benefit.
The “Havana” sequence is a tent pole that unites two unlikely lovers. “Tevye’s Dream” is a tent pole that takes an audience on a journey through the hero’s mind as he solves the main dilemma of the first act. Yet both also perform the basic duty of ramping up the heartbeat in an audience that is flagging. For Broadway theater from its inception, tent poles were the earliest form of pacemaker.
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Fiddler on the Roof has one great tent pole. Hairspray has an entire first act filled with them. Why have one where a multitude might be available? The exuberant team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote some of the songs before there was a book, and the book underwent a number of fairly drastic rewrites before the show opened out of town. But the number of joyous, up-tempo numbers in Act 1, more, perhaps, than might have seemed wise, stayed pretty much the same throughout: “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now,” “Welcome to the ’60s,” “Run and Tell That!,” “Big, Blonde, and Beautiful”—the songs keep topping each other and raising the tent progressively higher. It’s hard to identify the actual structural tent pole (I vote for “Run and Tell That!,” which is in the right place for one). An admirer of moderation in all things might object, but Hairspray celebrates the joy of excess. It only makes sense that the hits just kept on coming, and the show reflected a new reality in the audience as well. We’ve become excitement junkies with short attention spans. So what’s Broadway to do?
The musical theater world is responding as you would expect. Some of this can be attributed to the way rock concerts work, and today’s audiences are, for the most part, more familiar with live rock shows than they are with live musicals. Rock gins up excitement—that’s its stock-in-trade. It often also exchanges romance for sex, as a post-’50s audience has also done. Volume levels are way up, the backbeat pounds relentlessly, random pyrotechnics create a sense of danger and ecstasy, and audiences lose themselves completely in the wall of sound.
This has been going on for decades, of course—people who came of age in the ’60s are now frequently subject to what audiologists sometimes call “Jimi Hendrix hearing loss”—but it has arrived on Broadway fairly recently. For a long time Broadway fought a losing battle against rock, but so did American parents, churches, and pop singers. The opening of Hair in 1967 was the first shot across Broadway’s bow, and it caused an uproar. A positive review in the Times that more or less demanded that other shows pay attention to America’s new popular music caused anguish among songwriters and producers alike. Some of the traditional audience was offended in about equal measure by the nudity and the inanity of the lyrics. Traditional Broadway’s very way of life was threatened, and Broadway fought back. Three years later, the Sondheim/Prince collaboration made a case for the musical theater’s ability to continue to innovate and evolve without becoming a showcase for rock writers, but the first of their shows, Company, had at least a few rock elements. Everyone was worried.
While the war was going on, rock shows were becoming ever more theatrical. The relatively primitive psychedelia of Joe’s Lights at the Fillmore East in the late ’60s evolved into a whole new business involving carefully coordinated lighting effects and scenic patterns created by highly paid, highly skilled, and highly inventive designers. Rock stole from the theater, happily and with unabashed enthusiasm, while the theater was trying to fight off the onslaught of a new music and a new aesthetic.
But it couldn’t, and didn’t, want to fight off a new audience with money to spend. That audience’s demands for fresher, more contemporary shows ultimately led to Broadway’s waving the white flag.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Oklahoma! at the St. James Theatre, John Raitt, who had starred in the national tour in 1944, strode onto the stage and greeted an audience awaiting a preview of The Who’s Tommy. This promised a dangerous disconnect.
“Hello, everybody,” he boomed into a handheld mike, his rich baritone still in first-class condition. “I’m Bonnie Raitt’s dad!”
The audience roared. They had no idea who he was, but they sure knew his daughter. Raitt then launched into Oklahoma!’s title song and soon had the whole audience—young, motley, ragged, and stoned—spelling along with him: “O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahoma, yeow!”
The first peace treaty had just been signed and no one knew it. Revivals of Oklahoma! will no doubt be seen on Broadway again, as will Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, and My Fair Lady. But they’ll be playing next door to a show with a hard backbeat and a phalanx of Fender guitars in the pit.
The entire mode of presentation on Broadway, in fact, has begun to shift toward the world of concert rock, and why wouldn’t it? Broadway’s a business, and pleasing audiences with a combination of the familiar and the exotic has always been its aim. Shows like American Idiot and The Who’s Tommy adapted famous rock albums, and others celebrate rock icons from the Beatles to Janis Joplin. Wicked’s score is very rock friendly, and even shows that are based on classic plays, like Spring Awakening, have incorporated rock into their way of looking at a nineteenth-century world—it’s our music now. It functions just as the classic show music that was incorporated into the nineteenth-century river towns of Show Boat, the rural Maine Coast in Carousel, or the Oklahoma Territory. We tell our stories in our own vernacular no matter when they are set, and that’s always been true. But in whatever style—from operetta to hard rock, from “Motherhood March” to the Revolutionary War in rap—the audience needs a jolt, a tent pole, to get to the first-act curtain.
11. La Vie Bohème
Curtain: Act 1
When we left Sky Masterson, he was dragging Sarah Brown out of a Cuban nightclub. The two of them were headed toward the most typical kind of first-act curtain: the unraveling, in an instant, of everything everyone had planned. First-act curtains don’t have to be that, and as time has gone on, they have grown more unorthodox, but Guys and Dolls, unsurprisingly, has a perfectly put-together traditional one that’s worth taking a look at.
At the end of “Havana,” we’re still three songs away. And the three songs make up a suite, celebrating human courtship—as good a suite as you could hope to find. If you think of them as a single act of lovemaking, they encompass two lovers revealing themselves in ways they never have before, even to themselves, and then falling into each other’s arms as much in gratitude as in heat.
It begins outside the nightclub, where Sky finally puts Sarah down in front of an old disused fountain on a moonlit empty street (the fountain is a nice rococo romantic touch in a show that doesn’t have many). The simple question he asks her—“Are you all right?”—engenders an answer that surprises both of them. Sarah’s had plenty to drink, and actually, she’s more than all right. She’s feeling something she’s never felt before, or never allowed herself to. “Ask me how do I feel,” she replies, beginning to sing.
Ask me now that we’re cozy and clinging.
Well, sir, all I can say, is if I were a bell I’d be ringing!
Sarah has launched into a standard called “If I Were a Bell” that has been featured by everyone from Dinah Shore to the jazz pianist Red Garland. The song has an easy, insiste
nt swing that suggests alcohol, moonlight, and unbuttoning. The unbuttoning is the important part.
Sarah is not unbuttoning her clothes, however; she’s unbuttoning something much more important—maybe for the first time. She’s saying, in effect, “Did you think I was a missionary? I don’t blame you—I’m dressed like a missionary. Even I thought I was a missionary. But in this moment, I’ve realized I’m not a missionary. Strip away the missionary’s uniform and you will discover a sensualist underneath. And the sensualist is who I actually am.”
What a discovery! Everyone makes it at the same moment: Sky, Sarah, and the audience. Whoever you thought was inside those clothes, you were completely mistaken. By the end of the song, Sarah is emotionally naked, eager for what inevitably comes next, and as unashamed as Eve before the snake got to her. The song is a marvel of economy and transformation. It’s a series of comparisons—“If I were a lamp I’d light … If I were a gate I’d be swinging … If I were a bridge I’d be burning”—that stay well on the pleasant side of decency but leave no doubt as to what’s happening. Prim Sarah is ready for the life that she’s shunned, that always scared her too much to even imagine what it might be.
Lovemaking, however, metaphorical or actual, is most easily achieved with two naked partners. Loesser doesn’t shy away from this. The scene shifts back to Broadway, where we are carried by some transition music once “If I Were a Bell” is done. Sky escorts Sarah back to the mission as she asks him what time it is. Unsurprisingly, it’s about 4:00 a.m.—they’ve been to Havana and back, after all. Sky, almost unprompted, begins to explain what he likes about 4:00 a.m. And, as was the case with Sarah, his armor falls completely away.